United Liberty

Has the Tea Party movement taken over the Republican Party? It’s a loaded question, perhaps one that was definitively answered on Saturday when Mitt Romney chose Rep. Paul Ryan, a conservative favorite, to run along side him this fall.

Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks and author of Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America, joined Chris Matthews on Hardball last week to discuss the Tea Party movement and its influence on the Republican Party (note that the video below takes a moment to load):

A new study released last week by the Cato Institute noted that the Tea Party movement is fundamentally libertarian in its economic views — essentially more Ron Paul than Rick Santorum, if you will. If Kibbe is right and the Tea Party movement is indeed taking over the Republican Party, it’s hard to see how that is necessarily a bad thing.

The Republican Party has avoided governing on the rhetoric they use in campaigns for far too long. That’s what Kibbe and others involved in the Tea Party movement, which still has proved to have lasting power, are striving toward.